My emigrant Smith ancestor came penniless from Ireland with his young wife, and they lost their baby on the way over. They got off at Newcastle, in the closing days of September sometime in the 1790's. They had nothing but the clothes on their backs. A local farmer hired them almost certainly as indentured servants. Being industrious and thrifty they soon became possessed of a small farm, where their labor was divided between the plow and the loom. Their employer was a local justice of the peace in London Britain township, Chester County, Pennsylvania, John Whitten by name, a prominent Baptist and dairy farmer, who owned slaves. Both he and his son Davis Whitten, also a JP, were known as very scrupulous (for Baptist slave owners). Apparently Pennsylvania colonial law required that an indentured servant be given the means to support himself at the end of his term, which could be a piece of land, the money to get a piece of land sufficient to support a family, or the tools of his trade. John Smith bought 29 and a half acres of land nearby in October of 1798, I suspect with money he was given for that purpose when his term ended. The land was carved from a bigger farm and there was no house on it. According to the person who owned that piece of land in the 1990's, the house where he lived was built around the original small log cabin, in the 1850's . There had also been a barn. Excavating the house when they bought it, they found the walls stuffed with newspapers from the 1850's for insulation, and the remains of a fireplace in the corner of the basement, where the occupants lived while they built the log cabin during the winter of 1798-99. The Smiths had a toddler and a newborn baby at the time. The Smiths were Presbyterian, and tax records show that most of their assessed value came from their loom. This means that John Smith was a village weaver. Both John and Isabella were born in 1769, and they didn't come to the U.S. until probably 1794, certainly not before 1791, so he was also a weaver in Ireland (where both were born). Family records tell us who her parents were but not his, nor where in Ireland they were born or married. Every Sunday they loaded their 7 children into their one and only wagon, drawn by their one and only horse, which sometimes had a colt (from the tax records), and drove to the Presbyterian church in New London, 12 miles away - though the Baptist church where they had surely been dragged by their previous masters, was much closer. The Smiths also had two cows, and sometimes a dog. In the 1830's the Smiths lost the farm, because they had taken out a mortgage and never paid on it. Two of their sons had done extremely well in business and stayed nearby. One, my 2x grandfather, became possessed of a thousand acres of land soon after that. The other son bought out the mortgage and sold it. One of them must have taken in the parents, who were now in their 60's. At the church my 2x great grandfather helped found, with his name in the window, is a big memorial marker of quite a number of the family but John and Isabella are not listed on it as buried there. These Smiths were civilized people. I don't know for a fact that hte log cabin had an actual floor, or beds, or a table, but I suspect so. Isabella is described as intellectual of feature. There is no mention of the kids attending school. My 2x great grandfather was a lively active lad who loved sports, and he was apprenticed to a stone mason. Later he was supremely successful in business, acquired a thousand acre farm, helped found a church, and served two terms in the Delaware state legislature. He saw two it that his own ten children attended local private schools, even secondary school; we're told what advanced subjects they studied. In his younger days while figuring out what he wanted to do, my 2x great grandfather visited relatives (possibly siblings) in Ohio, decided he didn't want to live in the back woods, and returned to Pennsylvania/ Delware/ Maryland (the farm actually contained the three state boundary marker) and began assembling his thousand acres. These Smiths weren't your not better sort of Scotch Irish. They weren't Andy Jackson running around in buckskin with guns chasing whatevers, though they may have liked to hunt. Isabella almost certainly educated her children very well in that log cabin, and she almost certainly made sure they had a table to do their lessons at. (I don't know if Andy Jackson ever actually learned to read and write; he comes across as a prototype of George Bush.) William Smith, my 2x great grandfather, who became possessed of a thousand acre farm and served in the Delaware state legislature, after running a successful farm equipment selling business, built a nice two story house. He married the daughter of the Pennsylvania Dutch farmer across the road, who had a tavern directly across from teh little Smith farm. This tavern was the local hangout, and also served as the town hall. Meetings were held there and I wonder if the JP even held court there. The probate records make it clear that they served large quantities of coffee and cider, and they also had bedrooms upstairs where people could stay. In addition to this tavern, which was a reasonable sized two story house and is now occupied by a family, and was not built until I think the 1830's (about when the Smiths lost their farm?) the Dehavens had one of those stereotypical Pennsylvania Dutch two or three story large rectangular brick houses with many windows. They had a large family, and no more than two children could possibly have slept in any one bedroom. One gets the idea of extremely industrious and very clean Pennsylvania Dutch people. My point is would a daughter of that family, even a slightly nuts woman as she appeared to be, have married a pig who lived in a hovel on a dirt floor, with an open central fireplace - even though he no longer lived there. He seems to have gotten to know her when he was an apprentice or journeyman. But if that's how the clearly not at all well off people across the road from the tavern lived, everyone would have known it! Also, the Dehavens attended the same church as the Smiths, the Presbyterian church in New London. So they would have known the family well. OK, here's my question. The Smiths had 7 children Where did the children sleep? Typically in Scotch Irish log cabins, the children slept in the loft, but I wonder if this particular log cabin can have had a loft, if it was possible to build a two story house around it. I have been doing a whole bunch of research on what the houses my Smith ancestors lived in in Ireland and Scotland would have looked like. Evidently children were typically stuffed into trundle beds, or coffin beds, a second bed built into the wall, etc. In the American west, in log cabins, the Scotch Irish typically put their children in the loft to sleep, like in Little House on the Prairie, or maybe not always that nice. But it required a half second story under the roof, which required a high, sloping roof and walls. I am wondering how a standard two story house would have been built around such a cabin, particularly if the original cabin became the living room of the new house. I don't know if that was really the only room of the log cabin. I understand that John Smith's loom may have been in a separate building, in an adjoining room, or in the same room with everything else, in a corner. I have reconstructions, photos of weavers' cottages, and period paintings depicting all three scenarios. All my pictures depict four post looms, but Sandra assures me that John Smith's loom was probably the four harness type, which was similar but didn't have the big four post frame. It isn't the first time I've been told that. Amazingly, the period paintings that depict the loom IN the one room Scottish cottages, depict the four post variety. They all depict the children sleeping in a heap around a central open fire pit, which I strongly doubt is how my Smiths lived. The Y DNA suggests my Smiths are likely to have come from the northern limit of the Scotch Irish home region (southwestern Scotland), as distinct from the borders proper. I wonder if people and their cottages were less severely primitive to the north, up the coast, and the people less characteristically ignorant. According to EVERY Scotch Irish social history, a typical borders resident lived in a little scantily constructed one room hovel, which he shared with the livestock, that had a dirt floor, and an open central fire place, and everyone slept huddled around it. Privacy was unheard of. Nothing was ever washed because of whatever would attack if they did. If someone was dying, the whole community crowded around the bed to make sure as many other people as possible also died - well, not actually, but how can people have been that stupid. historians are unanimous that these people WORKED at being ignorant. They had their own brand of staunch individualism; they slavishly obeyed their lairds, who would ring the bell and summon them to fetch weapons (could be pitchforks) and go raiding. It must have been quite a sight to see these people galloping in with their pitchforks. I must say that if it weren't for the evidence to the contrary I'd have SWORN these MUST be my father's direct ancestors. He was clearly raised by people who loved violence, even though my great grandfather evaded the draft in the Civil War, an offense for which my father would have taken his belt to us for even talking about it, and my father had a stanuch attachment to paradoxical ideas about patriotism and liberty - a 1960's era Republican to the core. I thought his ancestor MUST have been Andy Jackson. Smith men, though successful in careers, seem to have been characteristically pretty useless at home, too, especially toward their sons, as well as violent tempered. Mind you, the homes were well kept; they just didn't seem to bond normally, except with wives and selected daughters. My father was outright proud of how ignorant he could be, even though he was an Episcopal minister and his walls were lined with books. He didn't trust books. If the evidence weren't that his ancestors were intelligent and industrious and educated to the point of defying the odds, I'd really think his direct ancestors lived in dirt hovels with their livestock and never washed anything. At the least there's some streak of real ignorance, and superstition, in his background. This kind of paradox is typical of the Scotch Irish. All of Scotland may have been a wonder; I recently read a book about an indentured servant, who had fled a village in Scotland because the people thought she was a witch on account of something odd about her hair. Yet the same people seem to have seized on any chance of education they could get. I kept catching snatches about children in his mother's line, which was Pennsylvania Dutch from Berks and Dauphin Counties, crowded together, as many as seven children in one room, upstairs with terrifying men yelling up the stairs for them to be quiet or else. Distant matches who share my brother's distinct I1 DF29- cluster trace to Ayrshire and Lanarkshire and one family insists they came from Perthshire (where they were allegedly aristocrats, I don't know whether to buy it). The other family that was not allegedly aristocrats, were village weavers and subsistence level farmers, before becoming coal miners in the 19th century. They lived in small villages in cottages. The family that WERE allegedly aristocrats kept showing up (three times) on the eastern shore, and buying large quantities of land, and one emigrant died owning books and pictures, whatever that all means. The nearest common ancestor to all these people lived between 1100 and 1400, one would tend to think in the same part of Scotland. There is some reason to wonder if they came from Flanders during medieval times, including the background of the aristocrats, and also possibly the Y DNA trail. Not a single one of these families is made of stupid people. Smiths have always been bright and creative. My 2x great grandfather's inexplicable skyrocketing career is pretty typical, though the record is uneven, and as many Smiths came to nothing. There is serious evidence of one of the milder and mixed up forms of bipolar disorder throughout the Smith family history. One could also have to explain how a family from Flanders had such a varied record. Smiths don't even seem to have ever made up their minds whether they wanted to stay put or wander. So, back to the topic, I'm wondering where and in or on what John and Isabella's seven children in a log cabin, around which a two story house was built, in London Britain township, at the corner of New Hope Road near where the town hall now stands, across the street from a house and outbuildings that was the Dehavens' tavern, would have slept in? Thanks for your ideas! Yours, Dora Smith